How do you play Money Maker?

You enter the Amsterdam of the Golden Age as the heir of a wealthy merchant banker. He is looking to find out which of his decendants he entrusts with stewarding the family bank into the next generation. To this end, he has devised a test.

He gives to all players a little money and an unlimited number of promises to money, called credit. With their credit players bid on investments. The highest bidder wins. Investments require a certain amount of goods or services to build, and can generate these products in your turn. Goods and services are traded for money on the markets, their scarcity determines their price. Players can use their money earned by selling products on the market for repaying their credit.

At the end of every round, an event happens that affects all players and brings closer the Bank Run, the day of reconing, when all debts must be repaid. If you repay enough credit when asked, your credit rating will improve, allowing you to spend more credit. If you are unable to pay off your credit, you must loan from other bankers. They will probably not do this for free though...

After the third Bank Run the game ends and score is counted. The value of all possesions is counted, and the value of all remaining credit is aoutstanding, and the resulting figure is your net equity, or your ending score. The player with the highest score wins, just like in real life.

The economics of Money Making

During the game players figure out that they can spend more credit than they have money to back it up, in otder to buy the best investments. In doing so, players are in a simplified way inventing Fractional Reserve Banking. Players experience the importance of liquidity, the availability of means to pay. The extra credit being spent increases the price of investments and subsequently in goods and services. The availability of credit allows players to become greedy when chasing after the most investments and their greed causes a credit-fueled boom.

Eventually the credit must be repaid. Players who have spent too much credit enter into a financial crisis. They need a bail out from their more cautious competitors. These competitors can exploit the need of the indebted player to demand the most lucrative properties or a hefty interest. One player's crisis thus becomes another player's profit. In this way, players learn about the importance of solvability, the ability to repay one's debts. While playing Money Maker players experience the credit-fueled boom and bust cycle.

When players repay their credit successfully, their credit rating improves. A higher credit rating means that they can spread out their credit over more places. This reduces the chance that they need to repay all of their credit at once. A higher credit rating means that players can create more credit and that the credit boom enlarges. Thus players learn about the importance of a good reputation and the benefit of leverage.

Also in the game box is version of the game where players cannot spend credit credit. This makes the game more simple to play for beginning players, and interesting for students of economics and banking. Players need to save up before they buy property, and players who jjust did buy property are out of the bidding market until they saved up enough. In this way there is no more boom and bust cycle, and experience the stability that comes with this. Playing Money Maker without credit is similar to a full reserve money banking system.

Some groups of players who are aggressively bidding up proces can end up in a place where everything is too expensive and there is too much debt to repay. This can put players in a conundrum; how to escape the debt trap? Credit exists because people believe it exists. At any time players may agree that the debt no longer exists. In doing so, players may cancel any amount of debt, if they all agree. THis last part is the most difficult part. Like in a real democracy, it is difficult to get everybody to agree on something controversial. Sometimes, when the debts are piled too high, forgiveness can be the only way out.

What do the players think of it?

Playing Money Maker is first and foremost a great game to play together with friends and family. The economy reacts in real time to the buying and selling that you and your friends do, meaning that no one game is like the next and new situations keep arising. There is something special about baiing out your friend, then splurging on yourself by spending his credit that he will have to repay. Often it is unclear who is the winner until the very end, when the score is counted. A player who owns a lot of propoerty might seem the richest of them all, but when all credit is subtracted, he can turn out to be much poorer than the more frugal players.

Many economics teachers and economy reformers use Money Maker to introduce people into the business cycles, the banking system and the influence of credit on prices. Rather than learning from a book, players are experiencing it in a game, which makes it all the more engaging. One can recognize when this message is starting to resonate with the players when they make references to real world parralels. “You are as bankrupt as Lehman Brothers" or “you are like Goldman Sachs, causing a financial crisis and then profiting off it."